This is no war of domination or imperial aggrandizement or material gain; no war to shut any country out of its sunlight and means of progress. It is a war, viewed in its inherent quality, to establish, on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of man. Perhaps it might seem a paradox that a war undertaken in the name of liberty and right should require, as a necessary part of its processes, the surrender for the time being of so many of the dearly valued liberties and rights. In these last few days the House of Commons has been voting dozens of Bills which hand over to the executive our most dearly valued traditional liberties. We are sure that these liberties will be in hands which will not abuse them, which will use them for no class or party interests, which will cherish and guard them, and we look forward to the day, surely and confidently we look forward to the day, when our liberties and rights will be restored to us, and when we shall be able to share them with the peoples to whom such blessings are unknown.

If some things are worth fighting for, then some things are worth giving up a little freedom for for a small period of time. It is YOUR responsibility to get that Freedom back when the threat has passed!

One of the next big battle in the "education/culture wars" will be the "Mental Health Screeing" of your children by unqualified people (Teachers) in a corrupt system that gets paid more for every "Special" child they can identify.

[If you haven't figured out that "Special Education" and legalized "Doping" was part of a plan to create and cement even more unnecessary payroll baggage in public schools - you haven't been paying attention.]

Now, some good news. A new law disempowers bloated school bureaucracies and empowers parents.

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Excerpt:

As of Friday, schools no longer have the upper hand in deciding whether children should be given Ritalin or other controlled substances. A new federal law tilts that power to parents, barring states and schools from keeping students out of class in cases when parents disagree with a recommendation to medicate a child.

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This issue isn't over by a long shot, though.

Illinois is ground zero in the attempt to solidify and entrench a "mental health" screening scheme in public schools. This is all part of "cradle to grave" intrusion into personal family health issues.

Connect the dots. Leading liberal pseudo-scientists are promoting the idea that adherence to principles (religious, personal, moral) are mental "aberrations" that need "correction."

Once you institute a process by which children are "screened" for "mental illness" you have the apparatus in place to divorce children from their parents that is even more aggressive than today's rabid schools.

We are only one Democrat Majority away from our schools truly become the "re-education camps" that the left has been working for decades to create.

"I believe that (Independence Day) will be celebrated by succeeding generations as a great anniversary festival. It ought to be celebrated by pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other."

The reason for the lack of children in James’s novel is a mystery. But the same can’t be said about Japan

Japan has one of the world’s lowest birthrates, only 1.3 children per woman. (2.1 children is the replacement rate.) This year, Japan’s population may decline for the first time since 1950—and it is a decline that will continue.

Younger Japanese, like their Western counterparts, are putting “careers and lifestyles over the pressures of having children and taking care of their parents.” The result is an aging population with neither children nor grandchildren to ease their loneliness

Ayn Rand often wrote that the left was self-immolating. Boy was she ever correct.

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Gay Group "defends" Gay-bashing - provided the bashers are from another group with accredited victim status. This is the type of story that just makes you shake your head and ask, "Are they nuts?"

Yes, they are.

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On April 30, American journalist Chris Crain became the victim of a hate crime in Amsterdam. While walking in the street holding hands with his partner, he was savagely beaten by seven men shouting antigay slurs. A few days later, Scott Long, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Program at the Human Rights Watch, expressed some sympathy for the gay-bashers. Crain's attackers were reportedly Moroccan immigrants.

"There's still an extraordinary degree of racism in Dutch society," Long opined to the gay news service PlanetOut. "Gays often become the victims of this when immigrants retaliate for the inequities that they have to suffer."

Welcome to Politically Correct World, where acts that would merit unequivocal condemnation if committed by white males are viewed in a very different light when the offenders belong to an "oppressed group."

The irony, of course, is that one of the principal reasons for the recent anti-immigrant backlash in the traditionally tolerant Netherlands is the fear that the influx of immigrants from deeply conservative Muslim cultures will threaten the country's liberal attitudes on social issues, particularly the rights of women and gays. (Pim Fortuyn, the maverick anti-immigrant Dutch politician assassinated in 2002, was openly gay.) This fear is shared by some immigrants—notably, the Somali-born politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

For my part, moderates are just as ideological (about not having an ideology) as anyone out there. In a battle between a person who believes in something and one who believes in nothing, bet on the former.

The tenet above is one of the reasons I'd rather spend a few hours arguing with an ideological opposite than a "moderate". Moderates generally are lying about being moderate - and you usually find them to be left, not right.

If they truly are "moderate" - look for them to spew "news-speak" and be very thinly imformed.

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Excerpt:

The assumption right off the bat in most of these articles is that moderate pols embody the wishes of the majority. Wrong. They are a tiresomely conceited minority to which the elite media assign an outrageously disproportionate influence. Together the McCains and the media do not obstruct extremism, as they kid themselves, but produce a new form of extremism -- a tyranny of the moderates under which the majority's legitimate will is thwarted in the name of this or that phony elitist objection.

Under the tyranny of the moderates, mealy-mouthed media darlings get to determine which judges are "inside the mainstream" even as they stand outside the mainstream themselves. How many elections would the Democrats have to lose (and de facto Democrats in the Republican Party, whose media-accorded authority comes from losing Republican primaries and thwarting the mainstream of their party) before their magisterial powers determining who and what qualifies as "mainstream" are questioned?

When debating vouchers with the rabid right - those who believe vouchers will make government take over ALL schools - one of the best points you can raise is "then why isn't the education establishment for them?"

Response: "Uh........"

The point is that you will get a better "sonar reading" of your ideas from you ideological enemies than your friends. With that in mind, I post what a well-received member of the left thinks of the "deal" on the filibuster.

So a deal has been struck on the filibuster. Republicans will allow Democrats to keep the filibuster as long as Democrats never use it. This way, both sides win (except for the Democrats).

Once again, the Republicans have shown their skillfulness when it comes to resetting parameters. Until recently, the perception had been that Bush had consistently filled the courts with extreme conservatives, with only a handful of truly batty nominees failing to meet the standards of Democrats. Now, facing the threat of the "nuclear option," Democrats have backed down on these as well. Thanks to the "finest traditions of the Senate" (Robert Byrd's words yesterday), there's a new agreement under which, presumably, only the certifiably insane can possibly be blocked--or, to put it as the senators did, nominees can "only be filibustered under extraordinary circumstances." That way, if Bush's pick for a judgeship finally goes too far even for Republicans--if he nominates, say, an Irish setter who, during confirmation hearings, runs up and bites Orrin Hatch in the leg, then Democrats will be allowed to play the bad guys and employ their filibuster. Otherwise, they'd better hold off, since, if they don't, Republicans might have to take the filibuster away for real.

Of course, if Democrats had been filibustering half of Bush's 200-some nominees instead of only a handful, or if, for example, they had spoken endlessly of "maintaining balance on the courts" and insisted that Bush also nominate some "centrists" and not only "extremists," then a compromise position would have looked very different. But by bracketing the debate between two right-wing extremes--confirm every nominee except for a handful or confirm every nominee through use of the nuclear option--the Republicans had won before they'd even begun.

Meanwhile, skilled negotiators that they are, Republicans have been wise enough not to gloat over their victory.

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Translated...

Bush wins. The icing is that McCain will never win a Republican Nomination.

Count me out of all the infantile conservatives carping about the deal that delays the rule change to end the filibuster.

If Brown & Owen get on the court, Bush won - plain & simple. The whining, carping and sackcloth & ashes moaning on talk radio and the blogs is counterproductive, in that it gives the left solace when they clearly lost.

The carping is evidence of the same 'cry-baby' attitude that we excoriate the left for engaging in. It seems that if we (as a nation, or as groups) don't get what we want (ending filibusters of judges), we will ignore that we get what we need (Janice Rogers Brown on the Appellate Court).

More later....but Bush won. The best thing he can do now is re-nominate Estrada.